Network servers may be used to provide a variety of online services such as, for example, electronic commerce (e-commerce), media streaming and social networking services. The servers housing a given online service may become overloaded with traffic due to a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, or perhaps even non-malicious levels of activity. Even for connections that are started between clients and the servers, response time may be slow due to lost packets. In such a case, clients may abandon their efforts to contact the service, leaving the servers with a substantial amount of their state capacity being occupied with stale connection data.